The explosive launch of Robinhood Chain this month has reignited one of Ethereum’s longest-running debates: Do successful Layer 2 networks drive demand for ETH, the asset, or do up-to-date entrants capture all the value for themselves?

The retail brokerage’s Arbitrum-based Ethereum L2 has become one of the busiest Ethereum holdings since its July 1 launch.

Over $141 million in ether was added to the chain in the first two weeks. DeFiLlama data shows that over half a million wallets currently hold ETH on the network, and the memecoin craze has caused Robinhood Chain to surpass Coinbase’s Ethereum L1 and Base L2 in 24-hour DEX trading volume.

Ether boosted this news, gaining about 15% from $1,582 on July 1 to $1,825 on July 13, According to to Coingecko data after a wave of bullish comments.

Eric Trump of World Liberty Financial sent July 11: “ETH is pumping hard! Good to see!” while Tom Lee, president of BitMine Immersion Technologies, he argued the launch reinforces the thesis that “ETH is money,” pointing to the asset’s role as the network’s native gas token and the L2 last resort on the Ethereum mainnet.

Ethereum investors have heard similar arguments before.

Related: Robinhood L2 sparks optimism in ETH, Saylor ‘muddies the water’. Hodler Review, July 5–12, 2026

Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base drove waves of users and activity into Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem, but failed to significantly impact the price of Ether as most of the economic activity remained in the bundles themselves.

Robinhood Chain’s launch is likely different. Unlike previous omnibuses built by crypto firms, the network was developed by a publicly traded retail brokerage with tens of millions of customers to support tokenized stocks and other real-world assets.

Just a few days after the premiere settled according to Token Terminal data for 6.9% of all tokenized shareholders.

Ether Price Reaction to Robinhood Chain Launch. source: Coingecko

And if Robinhood’s model is successful, it could encourage banks, brokers and asset managers to build their own L2s and cement Ethereum as the default blockchain for TradFi. Deutsche Bank is already in the process of building a ZK-based Ethereum L2 called DAMA 2, focused on institutional finance.

Why Robinhood could be a turning point

Ethereum L2 networks apply rollup technology to process transactions off the Ethereum mainchain and periodically settle them back to the network. Robinhood Chain uses Arbitrum technology and is compatible with the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

However, what has caught the industry’s attention is not the technology itself, but who is using it.

“This is a real milestone,” Alex Głuchowski, founder and CEO of Matter Labs, creator of Ethereum L2 zkSync, told Cointelegraph.

“This shows that Ethereum L2 has gone from something crypto teams experiment with to the infrastructure on which a regulated, publicly traded company will run its business.”

Instead of building the blockchain from scratch, as Stripe chose to do with Tempo, Robinhood chose to customize the Ethereum stack to meet its own needs “for privacy, compliance, and performance, while inheriting Ethereum’s security and connecting to its liquidity,” he added.

Max Shannon, senior research analyst at Bitwise, told Cointelegraph that Robinhood Chain’s success is more significant than previous L2 implementations.

“It represents the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem, especially among mainstream institutions,” he said. “This is also a time when Ethereum has more broadly repositioned itself towards institutions through Eth Labs and Ethereum Institutional.”

Does Robinhood Chain Change the Investment Case for ETH?

For Shannon, the launch of Robinhood strengthens the investment case for Ethereum as it strengthens the network’s position as the leading blockchain for institutional adoption.

He said ETH has the “network characteristics” to become a reserve asset for the growing L2 institutional network. However, like many, he believes that Ethereum’s tokenomics need to be improved so that increased network activity is more clearly reflected in ETH demand.

Ethereum has often been criticized for its decision to lower L2 fees as a way to drive adoption and achieve network effects. Ark Invest’s Lorenzo Valente published on July 14 that Robinhood Chain has generated $816,000 in revenue since launch, with Arbitrum taking a 10% cut, but only 0.15% of the total returned to Ethereum.

“If your thesis is ‘ETH is money,’ building Robinhood here is extremely bullish. More activity, more ETH collateral, more lindy. If your thesis is ‘ETH is an income-producing asset,’ then it’s an ultra-bear case.”

GrowThePie claimed that Valente’s figures for Eth’s share of revenue were overstated by a factor of four and argued that “0.6% of revenue is the correct number.” However, even a higher number is not a significant driver of L1 revenue. Robinhood Chain generated more gas fees than any other L2 last week, but Ethereum only saw $4,400 of that.

Source: MatzoGrowThePie

Glukhovsky said that ETH appreciation will not be based on fee revenue, but will likely be driven by ETH becoming widely accepted money in L2 ecosystems.

“People may pay fees in stablecoins or not think about gas at all,” he said. “But as more and more value flows through Ethereum, ETH is starting to look less like a fee token and more like an underlying monetary asset for this system.”

Related: Robinhood says its AI agent feature will “soon” assist cryptocurrency traders

Even ETH bears like Mike Dudas of 6th Man Ventures have this described Robinhood chain as “the bullishest thing I’ve seen in eth-land in years.”

But when Dudas saw Valente’s post, he did it in addition with the caveat that “Eth boiled unless ‘eth is money’ takes off or l1 settlement price increases.”

There remains the issue of accruing value

While Robinhood’s success may have strengthened the case for Ethereum’s scaling strategy, it hasn’t yet resolved one of the network’s biggest unanswered questions: How does growing L2 activity ultimately translate into value for ETH?

Shannon said that recent updates such as Fusaka have improved Ethereum’s scalability, but even though transaction activity has reached record levels, demand has yet to translate into significantly higher fees or increased ETH burn.

“Robinhood isn’t going to solve this problem,” Shannon said, and the collective development of L2 probably isn’t going to solve it either… It requires a complete shift in developer thinking and the economics of ETH tokens.

Another uncertainty is how much ETH institutional users will actually own directly. As tokenized stocks and other RWA assets increasingly trade on stablecoins, many users rarely interact with ETH, even though it underpins the network behind the scenes.

Robinhood may have shown that a immense financial institution is willing to rely on Ethereum infrastructure, but it is unclear whether this will ultimately translate into greater demand for ETH.

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